In the English-language media markets it is impossible for any journalist, editor, publisher or owner to be more corrupt, more of a liar, more of a fraud, and more of a success at selling all three than Rupert Murdoch.
That was until the mass media at which Murdoch excelled were superseded and outread by the alternative media. They call themselves the alt-media, but the alternatives they offer are no more than ideological variants of the same basic market laws which Murdoch has observed and demonstrated. That’s to say, making money at serving state force, fraud, and subversion.
Murdoch was even a success at selling outdoor advertising placards on Russian city streets until he was forced out of that market by men whose crookedness wasn’t greater than his, but who exploited their local political advantage in exactly the same fashion as Murdoch does. The outcome was that in 2011 Russia had the only government in the world able and willing to do real damage to Murdoch – and throw him out. That year Dmitry Medvedev was president; Vladimir Putin, prime minister. By them Murdoch was forced to sell his street signs and radio stations for less than a sixth of his asking price.
Murdoch swore violent revenge for that; he’s been at it against Russia ever since, from The Times to the Wall Street Journal to Fox News to Catherine Belton’s book.
Thirty years ago, as he was dying, Dennis Potter, the British screenwriter, said “I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time – in fact I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy – but I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.” Now that Murdoch is almost dead himself, and his family is cracking up over – what else? – the money, the cancer he represents in the mainstream media can also be recognized in the alt-media — and in the corner of the alt-media focusing on Russia and the war in the Ukraine. The Ruperts in this corner have names like Seymour and Gilbert.
If watching or reading them can be brain sapping, is there any remedy, and if so, what is it? These and other reader questions are answered in this Direct Line.
- What explains President Putin’s refusal to explain his decision to withdraw from Syria and abandon the country to partition between Israel, Turkey and the US? Is this stupidity, corruption, or something else?
President Putin thinks mnemonically and politically; this doesn’t mean he thinks strategically. This is the reason he is susceptible to making mistakes of anticipation, and repeating them.
Putin is a prodigy at memorizing and reciting data; that’s to say, he has the mind of a mnemonist. The first clinician to analyse what this means was the Russian neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902-77). First published in Russian in 1965, then in English in 1968, Luria’s work, the case study of S., one of Luria’s Moscow patients, is titled The Mind of a Mnemonist; read it in full.
Although their prodigious memories seem to be similar, mnemonists aren’t cognitively the same in their methods of recall or psychologically the same in their personalities. According to Luria, his patient S. couldn’t readily understand poetry. Abstract ideas were also a problem for him to follow – his thinking was graphic, not logical nor strategic. Also, “the big question for him, and the most troublesome, was how he could learn to forget.”
Luria didn’t generalize from his single case. Because the mind of the mnemonist is so rare, he acknowledged the impact of the mind on the personality is something “we know least about, is probably the most interesting.”
If Putin hadn’t performed his memory feats for record lengths of time in public – records no significant politician in the rest of the world can match – he would not have invited attention to them. And yet neither in his Russian biographies, nor in the foreign ones – friendly and hostile, balanced or unbalanced — can a section on his memory be found. In First Person, the authorized self-portrait prepared for Putin by three Moscow journalists in the year 2000, Putin’s fifth-grade schoolteacher was quoted as remembering “he had a very good memory, a quick mind”. She didn’t remember him as a prodigy.
His first wife, Lyudmila Putina, came closer. “Volodya always had a good memory,” she said. “It was the first time I saw him in action [St. Petersburg mayoral press conference]. I sat there open-mouthed. He talked about politics, the economy, history, and the law. I listened, and I kept thinking, ‘How does he know all this?’” Click to read more.
Putin also thinks politically; that is, on every topic which comes to him for decision he listens to or reads a wide range of views. To his interlocutors he appears to be attentive and to agree with them. In fact, he can appear to agree with several different and contradicting courses of action at the same time. He also agrees; decides; then changes his mind; issues a new, superseding decision. In this process, he tries to strike a balance between options and between those arguing their competing cases. Thinking politically in Putin’s case is balancing; it can look like equivocation, vacillation, indecision, confusion.
Case studies of this are rare because much of the evidence is missing. In Sovcomplot, the book on Putin’s decision-making in the Russian shipping industry, the evidence is in the vast court files of a 15-year litigation in London by the heads of the Russian state shipping company Sovcomflot and their predecessors, plus interviews with the Russian principals engaged. From the evidence in this story, Putin’s method of deciding by balancing between individuals, lobbies and factions becomes clear. So too, the cost in money, in the reputations and fortunes of individuals, in damage to the state.
Left: Alexander Luria; centre, his book published in Russian in 1965, then in English in 1968; right, Sovcomplot published in 2023.
Thinking politically is short term. Long-term thinking, with anticipation of what adversaries and allies will do in the future – this is thinking strategically. Putin has said that when he was a child, he thought it would be good for him if he played chess, but that was a game he admitted he didn’t play. Asked by journalists during the Direct Line broadcast of 2021 what games he liked as a child, he replied: “I really want to say chess, but unfortunately not. Just like everyone probably played hide-and-seek and tag in Leningrad courtyards back then. In some places they also call it salochki — we used to play tag.”
Putin has acknowledged that chess is valuable training in strategic thinking, and he has recommended state support for the game in municipal and regional budgets. Just once he has commented on an international chess match – the 2016 world championship between Sergei Karjakin of Russia and Magnus Carlsen of Norway. “We are certainly proud of our chess school and the outstanding grandmasters of our country,” Putin said. “We have specially created this direction at the centre for gifted children in Sochi, where these classes are organized at the appropriate level. But we need chess to develop all over the country…Karjakin really played great, he was just great. Magnus is an outstanding grandmaster of our time, and Sergei adequately represented Russia, our chess school. He is a fighter, and I am sure that victories are still ahead for him.”
There is no record of Putin playing chess himself.
The unique combination of these methods of thinking produce very different outcomes in the record Putin makes. The Syrian case is an example of his thinking politically, not strategically. This explains the political calculation.
The case of Putin’s protectiveness of Israel isn’t mnemonic, nor political nor strategic thinking. It’s sentimental, and it’s been with Putin since Leningrad courtyard days. It’s to be explained another time.
- On Gorilla Radio and elsewhere you’ve been saying that the Skripal case is more significant than the case of Julian Assange? What’s your reason?
The poison spray attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the English town of Salisbury in March 2018 was a British operation involving the intelligence and security services, the Defence Ministry, the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory, and senior officials up to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Theresa May. Their narrative – that President Putin had ordered an assassination by Novichok – has never been challenged in British or American public opinion, media or parliament. It was a powerful mobilizing step on NATO’s road to war against Russia, and it remains so.
Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been imprisoned for the past six and half years, almost totally silenced; Sergei Skripal is probably dead. They have served the British purpose. Nothing said or done on the Russian side has made any difference to their fate. Not a single British lawyer of note has spoken in their defence. The Russian media ignored the public hearings on their case which took place in London this past October and November. The Skripals are casualties of the war before the Special Military Operation began; there have been many more casualties since.
Julian Assange’s case was an Anglo-American and Swedish operation to silence Wikileaks, to stop whistleblowers and leakers from communicating their state secrets, as well as to deter journalists from reporting those secrets. Assange suffered five years of imprisonment but he was not silenced at the time, and in June of this year he was released. His lawyers were able to make an articulate, public case for his freedom, and they, together with the mainstream media, managed to expose the fabrications and illegalities in the prosecution of his case. But Wikileaks has been neutralized, not least by the terms of the plea agreement Assange signed on June 22, 2024.
Source: https://twitter.com/bears_with/
But even without the court cases against Assange, Wikileaks, and their sources, the impact of this journalism and of Assange himself on the objects of their reports — on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Ukraine, for example — has been brief and marginal. The public demonstrations for Assange in the UK, US and Australia have engaged far more supporters than have appeared against the war with Russia. Indeed, Assange’s well-known lawyers support the war against Russia.
The success of the Novichok narrative in the Anglo-American media is proof positive that next to nothing has been achieved by the Assange case in the very same media.
- The ban on you in Russia began in 2010, and since then your books, articles, and appearances are banned by RT, the state television channels, newspapers and book publishers. Not even the designated foreign-agent media and reporters from enemy state propaganda agencies are treated so severely and for so long. Why?
I was declared persona non grata by the Foreign Ministry in September 2010, and the ban has been confirmed to last fifteen years until November 2025. This was an action taken, not by the FSB or SVR which reported they had no security concern, but personally on the order of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Originally, the ban order was requested by the aluminium oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whose personal relationship with Lavrov and with other officials of the Foreign Ministry I and others had been reporting for years. My requests to Lavrov’s spokesman and head of press, Maria Zakharova, to reopen the file and reconsider the ban have been rejected without reply. Requests by oligarchs in the oil and mining businesses to invite me for short trips to meetings at their companies have all been refused. In July 2023 Lavrov personally refused to suspend the ban temporarily to allow me to accompany my wife’s body home to her funeral and burial in Tomsk. Judge for yourself what reason an individual has to behave like this continuously over fourteen years. I don’t know it.
- How can the Russian people tolerate what we in the West regard as such an obvious strategic defeat in Syria?
President Putin has made many mistakes of strategic anticipation. The Kiev putsch of February 2014 which overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and threatened the Russian Navy’s bases in Crimea was one; the defeat of the counter coup in Kiev at the Battle of the Antonov Airport of February 2022 was another; confiscation of $300 billion in the sovereign assets of the Central Bank in March 2022, another; the invasion of Kursk on August 6, 2024, was a recent one.
Putin doesn’t recognize the mistakes until afterwards; sometimes not even then. Occasionally he reckons they weren’t mistakes so much as costs for his thinking correctly, according to his political calculation based on balancing the assessments he had listened to.
For the time being, the president has convinced himself there are higher priorities for Russia’s defence and for its warfighting capacities than his order, several weeks ago, to the Russian General Staff and the army commanders in Syria not to defend the Assad regime, and to stand down while the Turks, Israelis and Americans partitioned the country. Even those Moscow military and political analysts who disagree – albeit in silence – acknowledge that that in the short term the Russian military could have not waged an effective counter-offensive. Whether (and when) Putin had already signalled to Ankara, Tel Aviv and Washington that he would not deter their plan to take over Syria is another matter – there is no public answer to this question, and the official debate is over and done with, in secret.
Just how done with, Putin explained to the officer corps at the Defense Ministry on December 16. He made no mention of Syria. There were implied references. “Bloodshed continues in the Middle East,” Putin told the military audience, “they conduct hybrid wars and implement containment policies against dissenting states, including Russia.”
He explained that in his decision-making the bottom line is political – too many demands, too little money. “I will repeat what has just been said: 6.3 percent of GDP is spent on increasing and strengthening defence capability. We cannot increase this expenditure endlessly, because all components of the country’s life such as the economy, the social sphere in the broadest sense of the word, science, education, healthcare have to develop, too. I am saying this so that everyone understands: the state, the Russian people are giving everything they can to the Armed Forces to fulfil the tasks we have set. Our task is to ensure the security of the Russian nation, our people, and the future of Russia.”
A Moscow source explains: “Putin is doing the Indian rope trick – sending the boy, then the magician up the rope and disappearing, to leave the audience gasping in amazement.”
Left: Putin at the Defense Ministry on December 16.
Right: how the rope trick worked.
“He can get away with whatever happens in Syria”, the source continues. “For the short term, he might get away from what happens in Ukraine by citing economic and inflationary pressures on the economy. He might announce, I don’t want to hurt your pockets for too long so I made a deal. He is saying to the generals that the people have ‘bled enough’ and you did not finish the job. He won’t tell them, you didn’t finish the job because I wouldn’t let you fight. We will not see any challenge to his authority — no candidates, no media or blogger will go against him. So there is a status quo for the next decade unless he retires at the end of this term [2030]. We should expect that the internal discussions, disagreements, or the ‘democracy’ within the system will result in a strong outcome. The outcome is looking very strong in how the economy and industry have been transforming. There are complete transformations in Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod, and Murmansk. Moscow is the most efficient and functional city in the world. We have a lot going well for us and we have to pull together to prepare for a big war. They were just not ready for what they have faced.”
- Gilbert Doctorow recently went on a podcast to call you a “suspect source” who has “the wrong friends expressing the views of disgruntled, probably retired colonels and generals”. What do you say to this?
I understand that Dr Doctorow was very upset at having to debate the evidence for the views he propounds, based, he says himself, on watching Russian television talk shows. He was so upset he almost walked away from his microphone in his Brussels house. I don’t know what he did later with the podcasters, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, behind the scenes. They subsequently cancelled a podcast they had commissioned with me on the Skripal case and they have banned me altogether, without explanation.
To understand what motivates Doctorow, it’s unusual for him not to publish a career profile of the academic curriculum vitae type or even a Wikipedia profile. What that blank space conceals is the time he took between his university degrees and between graduation and recorded employment. In my experience of others, especially of trainees in the Russian language in the US and UK, when two years or so are missing, the graduates have been working with or been trained by state agencies they wish to keep private. What Doctorow has allowed to be publicly known through a 1999 email of his is that after he graduated from Columbia with a doctorate which took eight years to complete, he went to work for the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). This organisation was established to promote academic exchanges between the US and the Soviet Union. It was indirectly funded by the CIA; if that was suspected by the KGB, it has been corroborated by US researchers and confirmed by Doctorow himself. He then says he moved to Russia for “the relatively cleaner business of strong drinks.” He became a Russian sales manager for a London-listed company called United Distillers, which subsequently turned into Guinness and then Diageo. During the Yeltsin administration, Doctorow says he was “Mr Smirnoff, Mr Johnnie Walker”. “Very congenial business”, he called it: “also very politicized business”.
What he doesn’t reveal is whether he is still in that line of Russian business – whether he has turned into a consultant advising Diageo on how to keep selling into Russia their whisky, rum, gin, vodka and Guinness stout. If so, Doctorow may be maintaining the “politicized” company he used to keep. That included Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa group which was a shareholding partner in Diageo’s Russian business, as well as a retail outlet for its drinks through Fridman’s supermarkets.
Diageo claims to have left its business in Russia when the Special Military Operation began. In the two years since, its share price and market capitalization have dropped by 36%. Winding-down costs in Russia amounted to $64 million, according to the company’s financial reports. Asset value writeoffs and impairments were accounted at $146 million. But Diageo’s alcohol brands keep coming into the Moscow market, often through schemes of sanctions-busting parallel imports through Dubai and other ports of convenience.
Diageo, like its competitors, is keen to know whether it will be able to return legally to the Russian market when the current war is fought or negotiated to its end. The terms of that outcome are likely to be of commercial as well as of political interest to Mr Johnnie Walker. So, to rephrase the question and counting about $200 million in Diageo’s losses and costs from the war, what options to recoup might Mr Johnnie Walker continue to advise? What “politicized” friends might Mr Johnnie Walker be keeping still in Moscow for the future? Would Mr Johnnie Walker disagree with the “politicized” line they advise, compared with the line of the General Staff he calls “suspect”?
Doctorow was asked for comment or correction “in the event you detect error of fact or analysis in relation to the report on your business in Russia for IREX and then United Distillers (Diageo).” He replied: “I write to you only to assert that you have maliciously distorted every aspect of my professional career within the possibilities of someone who has not researched it beyond reading the back cover of my Memoirs of a Russianist Volume II. If you had spent a few Australian dollars to purchase and read my Memoirs, you would know something about who I was and what I did. Instead by your intellectual laziness you are just disseminating empty malicious lies. I will not do you the honor of a public response.”
Diageo’s investor relations and press representatives in London were asked whether “your group of companies maintains an advisory, consulting or communicating relationship with Dr Gilbert Doctorow, once the group’s direct employee as a Russia sales manager in Moscow?” There has been no reply.
